People So Dumb That They Ought to Be Watered Twice-Weekly; DoJ Edition

US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan Barbara McQuade, who uttered this gobsmacking pit of stupidity:

"I think it would be reasonable to ban the import of open-source encryption software."

Jeebers. Good luck with that.

See, there is this thing called the "Internet", Babs. You may have heard of it. Our own government has spent large amounts of money developing software for people to use in order to evade the restrictions of overbearing governments. It's not as though code traveling on the Internet fills out customs declarations. Anyone with a modicum of computer skills can get the stuff.

And I'm not even touching First Amendment issues. Code is speech, at least one court has held that.

Still, Babs may get what she wants, if DiFi and her ilk have their way. They're pretty much a toxic mix of being both professionally paranoid and technologically illiterate, so unless the tech community stays on top of them and watches them as though they were jewel thieves at a damond expo, we'll get stuck with some pretty awful laws.

Because when it comes to freedom, there isn't a right or a liberty that DiFi and her pack of slavering security goons doesn't want to restrict. Except maybe the right to give money to politicians.

DiFi is Little More Than Evil Incarnate

Her latest idea is a law that would encourage Internet companies to share their customers' data with the Stasi and then immunize those companies from legal consequences if their upset customers find out about it.

Californians, you owe the nation an apology for sending her to Washington. DiFi has never met a freedom that she doesn't despise or a right that she doesn't want to eliminate.

(H/T)

Tab Clearing (Not Good Stuff)

The NY Stock Exchange has halted all trading due to "technical difficulties".

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The Feebies want backdoor access to everything to "fight ISIS". I'm not a software guru, but it would seem to me that the idea that the engineers can install a backdoor to encryption that hackers would not be able to exploit is an opium-derived fantasy.

And that Senator Feinstein is for it is, to my mind, a good enough reason to be thoroughly skeptical of the concept. For DiFi's default is always for giving more power to the American Police State.

DiFi Will Never Quit on the NSA

She's still fighting to expand the NSA's powers. Because that seems to be her mission in life, to let the NSA do whatever the fuck it wants to.

As compared to the Cybersecurity Act the Senate considered in July, 2012, the bill would dismantle many hard-fought privacy protections that had improved that legislation as it moved to the Senate floor. Indeed, the bill seems to disregard the revelations about surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency both within the U.S. and includes no new civil liberties protections responsive to those disclosures.

of course, it's not just Lady DiFi who is trying to pull the curtain back over the NSA's fuckery. She's getting lots of help from her fellow Statist, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Nuremberg). And MTAHNS has got its greasy paws in the mix, as well.

More and more, I am coming to the belief that about all that can be done is to keep one's head down and wait for the whole mess to come crashing down. A country whose government spies and monitors its citizenry is not a free nation, regardless of what fine words are enshrined in its constitution.

The Lies of Emperor Alexander and Jimmy the Perjurer

Turns out that while the Obama Administration was trying to give out the impression that they didn't know of and/or disapproved of the British government forcing the Guardian to smash hard drives containing the Snowden data, they really did know of it beforehand. And they tought it was just peachy.

For even after Snowden's leaks, the idiots in the spy agencies can't keep their electronic yaps shut.

General Keith Alexander, the then director of the NSA, was briefed that the Guardian was prepared to make a largely symbolic act of destroying documents from Edward Snowden last July, new documents reveal.

The revelation that Alexander and Obama's director of national intelligence, James Clapper, were advised on the Guardian's destruction of several hard disks and laptops contrasts markedly with public White House statements that distanced the US from the decision.

I am going to restate my guidance on listening to what the spooks say in public: Every word should be taken as a lie, including the words "and" and "the". If Clapper were to tell you that the Sun was to rise in the east tomorrow, you would be well advised to stock up on flashlight batteries.

It's getting hard to keep the outrage going. The revelations of how those fuckers are watching us all just keep piling up. We learned last week that if you even look up information about the Tor browser, the NSA will watch you because they think you're a potential terrorist. Go take pictures of a train or a dam and the FBI may keep a file on you for thirty years.

At this point, one would have to presume that the NSA is indeed keeping phone data, including content, on everyone in the country.

Here's a "what if" idea: Many of us have free long distance. So say that two people are going to leave their homes for awhile. Person A calls person B on their landline, person B answers. Then one of them puts the handset next to a radio tuned into a news/talk radio station and they both leave and go about their business. If enough people were to do this, the NSA's servers would be filled with millions of hours of NPR/Limbaugh/Beck or whoever your local blabbermouth is.

Don't Worry, Spooks, DiFi'll Have Your Back

I would not be surprised if the Senate guts this:

Surveillance reform gained new congressional momentum as the US House of Representatives unexpectedly and overwhelmingly endorsed stripping a major post-9/11 power from the National Security Agency late Thursday night.

By a substantial and bipartisan margin, 293 to 121, representatives moved to ban the NSA from searching warrantlessly through its troves of ostensibly foreign communications content for Americans' data, the so-called "backdoor search" provision revealed in August by the Guardian thanks to leaks from Edward Snowden.

The move barring funds for warrantless searches "using an identifier of a United States person" came as an amendment added by Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, and Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, to the annual defense appropriations bill, considered a must-pass piece of legislation to fund the US military. Also banned is the NSA's ability, disclosed through the Snowden leaks, to secretly insert backdoor access to user data through hardware or communications services.

Every bit of pushback against the Surveillance State is welcome. But make no mistake, the defenders of All Things NSA are powerful in the Senate.

NSA- Reform that Gilds Over the Turd

It's all a fucking con. It apparently fixes nothing of consequence. The consensus seems to be: "The folks at the NSA are good people, we can trust them not to do anything wrong."

Which, of course, is bullshit. The NSA was listening in to telephone calls between reporters and their editors. They were not only listening into calls between our soldiers and their loved one, they were passing around the racy bits for their buddies to chuckle over.

So the cycle will repeat itself. The NSA and the other TLAs will develop work-arounds so they can get whatever shit they want without having to follow inconvenient laws and procedures. The pro-statists like Sen. Feinstein and Rep. Rogers will pat each other on the back, knowing that they were able to dodge anything approaching real reform.

And the terms "online" and "privacy" will forever be mutually incompatible.

The penguin knows the truth.

Feinstein vs. CIA

A lengthy story on what is going on.

Speaking of torture, it's still going on.

"Cosmos" and More

I watched the initial episode of "Cosmos". I was surprised that it's on Fox, for reasons that should be obvious to any casual reader of this blog.

I was also surprised at the material about Friar Bruno. I haven't gone looking, but I suppose that the Christian Talibanistas have their knickers in a twist over that. The popular focus has been for centuries on the Church stifling Galileo, while ignoring the immolation of Bruno. Yet it was the execution of Bruno that likely convinced Galileo not to go too far in pushing his ideas. Even before Bruno's death, the Church's power was so feared that Copernicus waited until he was dying (1543) to publish his heliocentric model.

As for the show itself, better to give it a few episodes to see how it builds.

Lots of schadenfreude across the blogs over Difi's late conversion to the notion that spying on Americans is a bad thing. I suppose it speaks more to her sense of entitlement, if not outright naïveté, that she and her esteemed committee would somehow be exempt from being spied upon by the security organs of the American surveillance state. She must feel betrayed to have spent all this time defending the spies only to have the CIA try to shiv her.

But whatever it took,maybe now she'll realize that those birds need to be reined in, if not outright neutered.

Windows had a pasta-gazillion megabytes of updates from Update Tuesday. Something in that must have caused Firefox some butthurt, as Firefox didn't want to run this morning and had t do some sort of internal repair work.

DiFi Gears Up for War With the CIA

Her printed statement is a damning indictment of the CIA for engaging in torture and covering it up. Buried in her outrage about how the CIA has been trying to intimidate her committee staffers, violated the Constitution regarding separation of powers and violated Federal law regarding domestic investigations, she has confirmed that the CIA engaged in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The CIA's actions against Feinstein and her committee are puzzling. Did they really expect that she'd just shut up and take it? Have they forgotten that when the CIA pisses off Congress, that Congress can and will eviscerate them? (They've done it before.) Besides slashing the CIA's budget with a chainsaw, Congress can force the senior management to spend so much time testifying on this-that-and-the-other that they might as well take rooms in a Capitol Hill boarding house.

When it comes to a separation of powers battle, the party lines blur. Senators are senators first, before their political affiliation. They won't forget or forgive any of this, not without some resignations at the CIA.

As one of those who has been saying for a very long time that the CIA had become a rogue agency, I can only say this to DiFi: Welcome to the party, pal.

Stupid Spook Shit; CIA Edition

If you've followed even a bit of the Snowden Affair over the ten months or so, you will know that Sen. Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been one of the most reliable defenders of the NSA and the rest of the intelligence community as they seek to spy on everyone all of the time. She seems tho have found nothing wrong with the NSA monitoring all of our communications without any probably cause whatsoever. It's probably not too much of an exaggeration to remark that if the NSA installed cameras in the women's bathrooms at JFK airport, that Feinstein could be counted on to defend the practice.

Keeping that in mind, it was a bit of a surprise to learn that the CIA has been spying on her committee.

Because pissing off the people who decide how much money your agency is going to get doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Nor is providing firm evidence to the Senate that yes, you guys truly are out of control.

There used to be a joke that the difference between the Navy and the Boy/Girl Scouts was "competent adult leadership". Seems to me that the same joke applies to our intelligence community.

Another Step Towards the Panopticon

DHS apparently wants to link all of the license plate readers out there into one ginormous tracking system.

Because nobody in the government would ever think to abuse that sort of database for personal or political reasons.....

Remember the mantra of the DiFis of the world: "If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear."

(H/T)

Short Summary of Report on Privacy and Telephone Metadata:"It Has Never Worked. Shut it Down."

Just shut it down, R2:

The US government’s privacy board has sharply rebuked President Barack Obama over the National Security Agency’s mass collection of American phone data, saying the program defended by Obama last week was illegal and ought to be shut down.

A divided Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent and long-troubled liberties advocate in the executive branch, issued a report on Thursday that concludes the NSA’s collection of every US phone record on a daily basis violates the legal restrictions of the statute cited to authorize it, section 215 of the Patriot Act.
...
Not only did the board conclude that the bulk surveillance was a threat to constitutional liberties, it could not find “a single instance” in which the program “made a concrete difference in the outcome of a terrorism investigation”.
...
The board tacitly rejected the NSA’s public claim that the bulk phone records collection may have made the difference in stopping a terrorist plot connected to cab drivers in San Diego – a rare case in which a government review body has specifically refuted the NSA’s aggressive post-Snowden PR campaign.

“We believe that in only one instance over the past seven years has the program arguably contributed to the identification of an unknown terrorism suspect. Even in that case, the suspect was not involved in planning a terrorist attack and there is reason to believe that the FBI may have discovered him without the contribution of the NSA’s program,” it found.

The PCLOB's entire report. The dissent is interesting, for it is a tissue of either willful blindness or lies. The NSA is, contrary to the dissent's claim, tracking cell phone locations.

We have only the NSA's assurances that they are limiting their collection of cell phone data to foreigners.*

And we well know by now, from the NSA's statements since the beginning of the Snowden Releases months ago, that everything that is uttered by any NSA spokesman, official or one of their pet politicians is a lie, including the words "and", "the" and all punctuation.
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* The DEA does, something which the PCLOB seems to have ignored.

NSA Blame Game: The Russians Call it "Maskirovka".

Russia may have helped the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to reveal details of surveillance programmes and escape US authorities last year, the chairman of the House intelligence committee claimed on Sunday.

Mike Rogers, a Republican representative from Michigan, interviewed by NBC’s Meet the Press, said Snowden was “a thief whom we believe had some help”, and added that there was an “ongoing” investigation into whether Russia had aided Snowden.

Rogers is right up there with DiFi, they're both stalwart defenders of our national police state, as well as all things NSA and CIA. Neither one of them have been for any substantive reforms, at least until a groundswell of public opinion arose for reforms. So they're not exactly what one could call unbiased. If a NSA spook whispered this shit in Rogers's ear, you can bet your bippy that he'd be blabbing it to the press in a femtosecond.

More to the point of this post, you'd have to be naïve as all hell to not entertain the possibility that any so-called evidence that the Russians aided Snowden has been forged by the NSA (or the CIA or DIA). Given that those fuckers have been having wet dreams about whacking Snowden, it's completely plausible that their claims of Snowden getting Russian assistance are false and supported by false documents.

NSA's Giuliani Justification: Noun, Verb, 9-11

Borepatch links to both a blog and a letter from NSA insiders. You should read all of them.

I mentioned several months ago that the NSA's list of "number of terrorist plots we've prevented" had shrunk from the mid-fifties to maybe one. The NSA's current justification is "so what if we can't show it's been helpful to spy on all y'all? We still want to."

Like almost everyone except Emperor Alexander, his lackeys, and toadies such as DiFi and Rep. Rodgers, I am truly sick of the "non, verb, 9-11" justification.

Because of this: It is all bullshit. And it's as wasteful and as effective as the Maginot Line.

If you will think back to the investigations and committees that looked into the events leading up to 9-11, you might remember this: The NSA had all of the information that they needed to crack the plot in advance. So did the FBI. The problem wasn't that they didn't have the data, the problem was that they failed to make use of it.

In the parlance of the time, both the NSA and the FBI failed to "connect the dots".

They didn't need more dots. They couldn't draw the lines between the ones that they had.

But is it really the case that the U.S. intelligence community didn't have the dots in the lead up to 9/11? Hardly.
In fact, the intelligence community provided repeated strategic warning in the summer of 9/11 that al Qaeda was planning a large-scale attacks on American interests.
Here is a representative sampling of the CIA threat reporting that was distributed to Bush administration officials during the spring and summer of 2001:
-- CIA, "Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations," April 20
-- CIA, "Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent," June 23
-- CIA, "Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays," July 2
-- CIA, "Threat of Impending al Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely," August 3

The NSA's justification for the massive spying on Americans is now "well, we might need to read your personal shit someday". It's all bullshit. And fortunately, some legislators are coming to realize that. Sen Heinrich, for one, was formerly in the House of Representatives, and he is calling "bullshit" on the pro-NSA's statists who have been claiming that everyone was fully briefed on what the NSA has been doing.

It is past time to rein in the NSA, the FBI, the DEA and, for that matter, the local po-po. And if they won't come to heel, it's time to start using the power of the Federal (and state) purse on them.

Shorter Obama on NSA: "OK, Dammit, We'll Fix It."

President Obama, who has been defending the NSA's bulk collection of everything has signaled that he's backing off.

President Barack Obama has conceded that mass collection of private data by the US government may be unnecessary and said there were different ways of “skinning the cat”, which could allow intelligence agencies to keep the country safe without compromising privacy.

In an apparent endorsement of a recommendation by a review panel to shift responsibility for the bulk collection of telephone records away from the National Security Agency and on to the phone companies, the president said change was necessary to restore public confidence.

“In light of the disclosures, it is clear that whatever benefits the configuration of this particular programme may have, may be outweighed by the concerns that people have on its potential abuse,” Obama told an end-of-year White House press conference. “If it that’s the case, there may be a better way of skinning the cat.”

"May be outweighed"? Kind of being light on the touch, there.

Don't start cheering, yet. We have to be vigilant, for DiFi and her pro-NSA buddies in the House and Senate can be counted on doing everything possible behind the scenes to guy any legislation aimed at reining in America's spooks. Surveillance is cheap. The NSA could probably record all of our calls for about nine pennies a person per year. Which, given their annual budget of $11 billion (possibly much more), is chump change.

Make no mistake about it, legislation is what is needed. Not executive orders that can be nullified at the stroke of a pen. And then we need real oversight of the spies, not just the one-sided FISA Court. Because the NSA has a long record of doing whatever the fuck it wants to, regardless of what the laws or the rules or a court may say.

Another thing that is necessary is to cut the NSA's budget with a meat axe. One of the problems seems to be that they have the money to do almost anything that comes into their minds. Maybe if they had to do a serious cost-benefit analysis every time one of their Stasi-inspired clowns comes up with a bright idea, they might think twice about doing shit. For now, it seems that the question of "should we do this" is one that never gets asked at Ft. Meade. Taking away a lot of their funding might force them to ask that question from time to time.

Here is another question that the NSA, CIA, DoD and everyone else should start asking themselves: "How will this program look when we read about it in the papers?" Hundreds of thousands of people work for those agencies in intelligence jobs. It's a far stretch to assume that Edward Snowden was the only one with a set of functioning morals who has ever worked there.

Sen. Feinstein: Still Mongering the Fear

Because playing the "zOMG!! Because Terrorism!!" card never gets old for her.

The terrorism threat against the United States is increasing and Americans are not as safe as they were a year or two ago, the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees said on Sunday.

Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Mike Rogers appeared together on CNN's State of the Union, on the day that al-Qaida's US spokesperson called for attacks on US interests around the world. Rogers said al-Qaida groups had changed their means of communication as a result of leaks about US surveillance programs, making it harder to detect potential plots in the early planning stages.

"We're fighting amongst ourselves here in this country about the role of our intelligence community that it is having an impact on our ability to stop what is a growing number of threats," he said. "And so we've got to shake ourselves out of this pretty soon and understand that our intelligence services are not the bad guys."

Bullshit.

Rogers and Feinstein are both putting out a very simplistic view: "They bad. Spooks good." And I'll bet that if you were to surf the major American news outlets, you'd find that they are just lapping that shit up, without a jot of critical thought.

I don't deny that there are people and groups around the world who wish to do us harm. But some perspective needs to be kept in mind, namely that terrorism is a tool of the weak. And it most often fails in its objective. When terrorists shot the shit out of a hotel in Mumbai a few years ago, what did they accomplish? Did they change Indian foreign policy to be more receptive of the terrorists' political goals?

No, we give the terrorists what they want when we over-react. We give the terrorists what they seek by spending hundreds of billions of dollars on bullshit security theater, but our government regarding all 300 million Americans as potential terrorists, all of whom must be watched. We give the terrorists what they want when broad surveillance and monitoring serves to drive a wedge deeper between the government and the governed.

We give the terrorists what they seek when we toss away our hard-won freedoms and liberties "because terrorism!"

So yes, those who seek to engage in acts of terror are bad guys. But so are those who have been stripping us of our Constitutional freedoms and protections in the name of keeping us safe.

Can we get rid of the "we need to wiretap everyone to prevent another 9-11" rationale? The reports after the fact made it pretty damned clear that the Feds had all the information that they needed to detect and prevent the attacks. They just didn't put the pieces of the puzzle together. Saying that "we need to do more surveillance to keep you safe" is bullshit. They couldn't even analyze what they had before 9-11 and they sure as shit can't do it now. In point of fact, this broad surveillance is making us less safe.

Oh, and can we also stop calling the "FISA Court" a "court"? Maybe call it a "star chamber" or something else? Courts are were things are decided by the means of an adversary process. Both sides get to put on their case and a judge or jury decides. The FISA Star Chamber is nothing of the sort, for only the spies get to argue before it and then the judges pretty much haul out their rubber stamp of approval.

It'd be as though somebody showed up to move into your house because they bought it at a sheriff's sale that was held in secret, based on a court proceeding of which you were given no notice or afforded an opportunity to appear and you had no right to even reopen the matter. Nobody (other than a bankster) would think that was fair. But that's just how the FISA Star Chamber has been operating for over three decades.

NSA: A Clear Threat to Freedom, Liberty and Democracy

I think it's fair to say that Peter the Bayou Renaissance Man and I probably don't politically agree on very much.

Having said that, I am 110% in agreement with his latest post on the NSA.

Our government's position on online privacy is pretty much this: Fuck you. They say that they are against "illegal surveillance", but then they take the Nixonian position that "if we do it, it's legal".

And it's not just the NSA. The FBI has been carrying much of the NSA's water when it come to wiretapping and bugging everyone.* Private companies have also gotten into the mass surveillance act.**

And of course, up on Capitol Hill, Sen. Feinstein is working her utmost to legalize everything that the NSA is already doing and to give all cops unfettered access to the NSA's database, a stance that even gives the NSA some qualms.

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* You do know that they are able to turn any cellphone they want into an active bug?
** When compared to corporations, serial killers are mere amateur pscyhopaths.

DiFi Hates Freedom

Sen. Feinstein's committee of NSA lackeys has voted out a bill that would make it legal for the NSA and other law enforcement agencies to search through your emails without so much as a by-your-leave from any type of judge.

Feinstein calls her bill "The FISA Improvement Act", which might as well be called the "Gutting the Bill of Rights Act".

I'd like to know who were the 10 other senators who voted with DiFi to make legal what the NSA has been doing illegally. But try and find that anywhere. Because compared to a buggy site to sign up for health insurance, further enabling the National Surveillance State is small beer to our vaunted press corps.

See, paying attention to all of this NSA stuff is hard work compared to bleating about the problems using the Obamacare website.

At this point, if you are not using encryption for your emails, then you've probably pretty much consented to DasGov, at all levels, being able to read them.

A Civilian for NSA Head = More Power for DiFi

Because if the Administration converts the NSA into being run by a civilian, Sen. Feinstein will get a larger say in who runs the NSA.

Funny how that works. And not in a humorous way.